NodeJS, NPM, Electron

By R. S. Doiel 2017-10-20

Electron is an app platform leveraging web technoligies. Conceptually it is a
mashup of NodeJS and Chrome browser. Electron site
has a nice starter app. It displays a window with Electron version info and
‘hello world’.

Before you can get going with Electron you need to have a
working NodeJS and NPM. I usually compile from source and this
was my old recipe (adjusted for v8.7.0).

Notice Electron depends on a working node and npm. When I
tried this recipe it failed on npm install with errors regarding
internal missing node modules.

After some fiddling I confirmed my node/npm install failed because
I had install the new version of over a partially installed previous
version. This causes the node_modules to be populated with various
conflicting versions of internal modules.

Sorting that out allowed me to test the current version of
electron-quick-start cloned on 2017-10-20 under NodeJS v8.7.0.

Avoiding Setup Issues in the future

The Makefile for NodeJS includes an ‘uninstall’ option. Revising
my NodeJS install recipe above I now do the following to setup a machine
to work with NodeJS or Electron.